Form and Reform in Eighteenth-Century Spain: Utopian Narratives and Socio-Political Debate by Carla Almanza-Gálvez (review)

Although many important dieciochistas have devoted their attention to utopian texts written in Spain in the long eighteenth century (Jesús Torrecilla, Monroe Hafter, Paul-Jacques Guinard, José Luis Abellán, Helmut Jacob, Elena de Lorenzo Álvarez, Jesús Cañas Murillo, and, especially, Pedro Álvarez de Miranda), Form and Reform in Eighteenth-Century Spain: Utopian Narratives and Socio-Political Debate is the first book-length study of its kind. It is a book whose potential readership goes beyond the field of Spanish eighteenth-century specialists. It will interest global scholars in utopian studies and also Latin Americanists, especially those in the field of Colonial studies. The close reading of five utopian works by Dr. Carla Almanza-Gálvez connects her primary sources with wider temporal and geographical contexts. She approaches several texts that were unknown to scholars of the last half of the twentieth century, some of which were lost and remained anonymous for a long time.

Although sharing More's spirit, Spanish utopian texts were born in connection to "the reformist spirit that characterized the political and cultural life of the Enlightenment era" (1). Almanza-Gálvez argues that even when right after the publication of More's Utopia an early European utopian tradition emerged, Spain had to wait until the late seventeenth century (the last decades of the Habsburg Dynasty) to have its first utopian texts. These early utopian texts were connected with the work of the so-called proyectistas, self-appointed advisors to the king who proposed sometimes crazy, sometimes useful solutions to improve the state of the nation and its economy, agriculture, and government. According to Almanza-Álvarez, "This late manifestation of Spanish utopian writing can be seen to parallel the reformist spirit that characterized the political and cultural life of the Enlightenment era" (1).

Why did Spain not have a utopian tradition of its own soon after More's text was published? While Almanza-Gálvez does not outwardly propose a radically new way to understand the Spanish utopian tradition, she defends a heterogeneous understanding of utopianism that is original in its flexibility and in its attention to what is unique in the Spanish tradition without detaching Spain from its European and Colonial Hispanic context. Almanza-Gálvez studies texts that are clearly utopian but also more experimental, proto-journalistic narratives that are profitably read under the rubric of utopian studies. By doing so she firmly rejects the scholarly trend that questioned, until very recently, the existence of such a tradition in Spain, an idea that derives from a critical prejudice inherited from the beginnings of the scholarly leyenda negra that even negated the existence of an Enlightenment in Spain due to the influence of Catholicism. Instead of further advancing the incompatibility of Spanish Catholicism with the spirit of the Enlightenment, this book by Dr. Almanza-Gálvez demonstrates that utopian and religious texts often share a similar spirit and goes back to the Morean source to firmly establish this fact. The ideological diversity of the five utopias she focuses on allows the reader to perceive how the Morean paradigm can be adapted to different purposes in the same time period by different authors. Moreover,. Almanza-Gálvez defends that one can find utopian texts embedded in unlikely places, such as in articles hidden in periodicals. In this way, she implicitly expands the notion of utopian text and by doing so prepares the concept to be used in ways that may even challenge the notion that Spain was a late bloomer in utopian literature.

Almanza-Gálvez divides her book into two parts. The first is devoted to "The Literary and Socio-Political Foundations of Spanish Utopianism." This segment defines, on the one side, the "Utopian Fiction and the Morean Model," and, most important, it connects Spain's unique and late approach to utopianism as defined by the Morean...